Musika:
What detail do you have in mind?
The detail of you repeatedly framing the question in a political vacuum.
Are you saying that God does not need actively to will the trees to grow for them to do what they do?
It's more that there is no space between willing and action ... much like the use of word "intervening" to describe your own consciousness .... under normal circumstances it becomes odd to suggest there is a "space" one is "filling". Under normal healthy conditions, you don't have to rigorously focus your will or undergo some democratic process . You just desire it, and your arm moves. The space between your will and action is practically instantaneous.
That he can set it and forget it, so to speak? If so, then I come back to my original question: what is he doing now? If he set everything in motion back at the big bang, what has he been doing with his time since then? And what is he doing now, if anything?
I am not saying that. What I am saying is that you are begging the question if you insist on framing the q in a political vacuum.
I'm not trying to prove that God doesn't exist, here. I'm just asking, if he exists, what he is actually doing.
Yet here you are, citing his lack of direct appearance in the sciences as some sort of conclusive basis for atheism.
The real question is what makes you think it is valid to cite science, since in this regard it cannot go further than suggestions.
I take your point that he might be tweaking invisible knobs undetectably, and I admit that I have no way to disprove that hypothesis.
Its more to the point that your grasp of botany is not anywhere complete enough to meaninfully talk about ultimate causes. No need to introduce God when one can just as easily cite the projected trajectory of the future of empirical botanical investigation to undercut whatever "completeness" you care to currently advocate.
But I thought theists might have better reasons for believing in him than mere faith that something is tweaking those knobs behind the scenes.
Or is it a case of expecting atheists to have no better reasons for disbelieving than mere faith that their current level of knowledge about tweaking knobs is sufficient to excise God from the picture?
You're saying that people just have to have faith in God, right?
If they can't abandon their faith in empiricism as the final last word in epistemology, I guess so. Its difficult to fathom how such people would have any other option before them.
Also, I have my doubts about that "harmonious balance on a chaotic fringe" stuff you mention. What are you thinking of, specifically, in terms of the harmonious balance? Is this a version of the argument from design?
The word "harmony" can be used both in and out of an id context. I imagine that even the staunchest advocate of scientific chaos appreciates, at the very least, some elements of harmony when it comes to determining their payroll slip.
Then it appears that you have determined that God, should he exist, must exist in a necessary relationship with the observable world of trees and what not.
IOW since one can examine a tree and not see a direct connection to God, this throws a grave doubt on the very existence of God (IYHO).
I'd say the harmony in biological mechanisms is a result of evolution, which doesn't appear to require God. Which brings us back to your point about suggestions, I guess.
Precisely.
Evolution doesn't necessarily empower or discredit a theistic or atheistic world view beyond mere suggestions.
I still don't know what you mean when you say "necessary", in reference to a cause.
It means that if you study the effect, then by necessity, the cause must reveal itself. So in the case of a car accident, the forensic team arrives on the scene and examines the accident (the effect) and proceeds to work out how it was caused. If necessary cause and effect was not in play, there would be no point in bringing in a forensic team.
So as it pertains to this topic, you are suggesting that the activity of God should be necessarily observable by examining the phenomenal world (the effect).
There are problems with this idea of yours, namely that it is common experience that persons can cover their agency as causes.
This can occur either through their own resourcefulness or the limitations of knowledge from those left to examine the effect. So, here we have God, a figure attributed with all resourcefulness, being pitted against the necessarily meager empirical investigative capacities of human society.
Is a necessary cause different in some way to a plain vanilla cause?
Depends on how you tie it in to the effect.
For instance we may have an old painting with a sky rendered red by the artist. Obviously the painting is an effect of the artist, but we cannot adequately trace the necessary cause for the artist painting the sky in that particular manner (assuming they had access to a palette more varied than red). They could just have easily painted it blue or grey or white or green.
IOW it is the nature of free will that it is not governed by necessary relationships of cause and effect.
Suppose I find a freshly-baked cake. I infer that it was made by a person - that a person was its likely cause. That's because I'm not aware of anything else that makes cakes, other than persons. Moreover, I can't come up with any "natural" mechanism that would tend to cause cakes to appear of their own accord.
So, in the absence of any information about the baker/cake owner, can you also determine why a cake was made and not a loaf of bread, or why anything was made at all?
There seems to me to be no analogous problem that requires us to deduce the existence of God,
If our free will is the one thing God doesn't mess with, existing in a world that
required us to deduce His existence through observing it would defeat the purpose.
although admittedly we don't know what started the universe yet. With the cake it's a little different, because there is ample evidence that people cause cakes, whereas there's no evidence that gods cause universes.
So once again, we are back to what you estimate to be the necessary relationship between God (the cause) and the universe (the effect). If God is going to "bake a cake", it is impossible for him to do it in a manner that flies under the radar of an atheist, or so you would have us believe.
What do you see as the problem in tracing "necessary cause" to a person?
According to their resourcefulness, there is no (necessary) requirement for a person to act in a particular manner. This is why, for example, psychology remains markedly distinct from physics.